Beliefs, something created thousands of years ago. But why? By who? No one knows.
I think, like many others, that religions were created to scare and control the people back in the day. "You shall not commit adultery, You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, You shall have no other gods before Me". The 10 commandments. Rules to make the, for that time, simple people listen. To control them. People back in the time didn't think like we do these days. Which of course comes from the fact we understand so much more then we use to do. There are still things to discover and learn about the world, for sure. But people these day (that is in more developed parts of the world) don't need to struggle for survival anymore. Compared back to the time when living was a real struggle, when education was a gift not a requirement. When food on your table was treasured instead of wasted. People lost the need for religion as soon as they lost the need for survival.
Sometimes people forget what kind of a bad period humanity went through before like the industrial age and even that wasn't a pleasure to be alive in it but it resembles more of todays time. Even though the amount of followers of believes rose in the period 1800-2000, thats also because the world population increased by 6 times, at the same time the amount of Christian followers increased by 9 times.
This also makes clear that around the 1800 (industrial age) the quality of living increased significantly. But how come the amount the followers increased with it while i said that it was used to control people back in the time? Well, big things like that take a couple of years to get filtered out. Parents have specific morals like " God is important in my child's life","My child will go to a private school because of ...". These morals go from parent to child and then again and again throughout the ages. These days people go less and less to the church every Sunday. Even those people then only went on special holy holidays don't even go anymore. People these days don't need the control of something like a god anymore, the governments and politics took that over. Governments have to make sure to keep it's people save. Not god anymore. But then again. isn't the government like a religion, controlling people to its will to win wars and gain more power but instead of just blaming it on a religion they also just blame it on all kinds of weird stuff these days. People lost their thick skin they gained from surviving all these years through plagues, natural disasters, wars. We get to offended these days. Because the need of constant looking for ways to survive was lost, we started to look more at others then ourself. Blame others quicker.